Word: chronicic
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Cancer-pain management has also changed dramatically. Physicians today give megadoses of morphine without great risk of depressing a patient's breathing. Sloan-Kettering's Foley estimates that the morphine doses she prescribes for chronic cancer patients, usually as time-released tablets, are at least ten times the amount she gave a decade...
...have been added to the analgesic arsenal. Tricyclic antidepressants like Elavil, for example, are now recognized as highly effective for the agonizing pain caused by damaged nerves in patients with shingles and diabetes. Methadone, the synthetic heroin substitute, has found new use as a cheap, long-lasting easer of chronic pain. And fentanyl, a highly soluble opiate, is available in a stick-on patch that offers up to three days of relief from the chronic, steady pain endured by many cancer patients...
...Chronic pain remains the biggest challenge because it is less well understood than acute pain. It may range from mild back discomfort to an amputee's agonizing phantom limb pain. While acute pain is essentially a healthy response to tissue damage, much of chronic pain is considered "neuropathic" -- the result of inappropriate nerve signals. Physicians now rely on physical therapy and behavioral techniques like biofeedback to battle chronic pain. In severe cases, they resort to antidepressants and local nerve-block injections, with varying results...
...year 1000, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- War, Plague, Famine and Death -- were riding unimpeded. To be sure, the apocalyptic Four have a sort of chronic credibility: They have been prominent in every century. The world would be paradise indeed if they visited only at each turning of a thousand years. But in the centuries since the first millennium, zealous, punitive preachers have endlessly invoked the Four, backing up their threats of doom with Revelation...
...college sleep/wake cycle is unhealthy for two reasons. First, it causes chronic sleep deprivation, and second, it is interrupted on a regular basis...